A conversation with Rev. Pieter Both
On loss, faith, and the everyday Life
An morning with an inspiring minister from De Regenboog in Harderwijk
Having just returned from a family holiday in Paris, where all the major highlights were dutifully checked off—from the Notre Dame to Sacré-Cœur, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre—I find myself sitting across from Pieter Both. A minister who doesn’t fit neatly into any box, a teacher with genuine passion, and a man who has experienced life in all its fragility.
From Rotterdam to Harderwijk, and everything in between
Pieter Both, the minister at De Regenboog—a reformed-evangelical oriented local church in Harderwijk—is a man of many hats. Alongside his work in the pulpit, he spends a few hours a week teaching at a secondary school, “really just as a hobby,” he tells me. “When I finished my theology degree at 25, I worked full-time in education for quite a while,” he explains. “Now I’m back to being a minister, with some hours of religious education on the side.”
At home, life is wonderfully hectic with five children: three twenty-somethings from his first marriage (his wife passed away suddenly some time ago) and two younger children, aged ten and eleven. “Two generations under one roof,” he laughs. “Three, if you count the boomer parents.” Although the eldest three have moved out to study, they adore the youngest two. “Our fourth child, Levi, is our connector. His name actually means that,” he explains. “By having children together again, we felt we became even more of a single family unit.”
Roots and the switch to the PKN
Although he spent his youth in Barendrecht, “really South-Rotterdam,” and his roots lay in the Dutch Reformed Churches (Gereformeerde Kerken Vrijgemaakt), he has always been a free thinker. I recognise that world, partly from my own reformed upbringing—a world where you sat together at birthday parties, yet the conversation groups unconsciously remained separate.
“The Dutch Reformed Churches were once a stronghold of theology, and of rigidity,” I interject. Pieter nods and is unequivocal: “I’ve only been a minister for eighteen years, but I sometimes say: we didn’t leave for nothing. The immediate reason was the issue of women’s ordination—my first wife felt a calling that could not be honoured there at the time. But the real cause was deeper. I am simply a free thinker. I love colouring outside the lines.”
In 2004, shortly after the formation of the PKN (Protestant Church in the Netherlands), his first wife was the very first to complete the colloquium for admission to the ministry there. “That was certainly a culture shift,” Pieter admits. “But I was never really in that system from a young age. The Dutch Reformed Churches are very different now than they were back then. I would fit in fine there today. But in my youth, that rigid systematic theology felt like too much for me.”
Loss and the birth of a broader theology
As might be expected, the conversation inevitably turns to the great loss in his life: the sudden death of his first wife from meningitis. Within a single day, she was gone. That calamity radically changed his experience of faith.
“Even more emphatically than before that time, I started to see the work of Jesus as broader than in classical orthodoxy, where it is solely concerned with sin,” he explains. He refers to the famous reformed theologian Noordmans, who wrote about ’the sinner and the beggar.’ “In the Protestant tradition, there are too many sinners in the church and too few beggars. Theology has narrowed itself down to Jesus’s work on sinners, and too little on beggars—more on the perpetrator than on the victim.”
He clarifies the distinction: “You can say: Jesus dies for my sins. That’s fine. You can also say: Jesus dies, and because of that, God can reside in death. That is a completely different perspective on the very same cross. Classically, you say: the resurrection of Jesus means I know for sure that my sins are forgiven. But you can also say: the resurrection of Jesus means He was the first to rise, and we will follow Him. I have come to see, emphasise, and experience that second perspective more and more.”
On sin and misery
“The word ‘sin’ has completely disappeared,” I suggest. “I find that rather vague,” Pieter responds cleverly. “The phenomenon hasn’t gone, only the word. People actually have a very strong awareness of the misery in the world and certainly recognise that they themselves aren’t always great, either.” When performing a baptism, he asks parents if they believe their child is born “into a world where sin, misery, and death are present,” with the hope centered on Jesus Christ.
The interesting thing, he notes, is that non-believing partners often find the question the most beautiful. “The believing father says, ‘Does it have to be about sin and death again?’ And the non-believer says, ‘I think that’s the most beautiful question there is. Because that is the reality of our lives.’ A lot of Christians have become a bit ashamed of that word,” he continues. “But the new generation is growing up without that negative connotation. If you simply say what you mean—that things go wrong in this world and in your own life, with a perpetrator side and a victim side—then there is recognition.”
The clumsy worker and the secret of hospitality
“What is the secret behind this atmosphere of hospitality and feeling at home?” I ask him. People travel from far and wide to attend De Regenboog. He laughs modestly. “I really don’t know. There are always men with growing churches who have a ready-made answer, but I see myself as a prutser (a clumsy or fumbling worker) in the church. I’m just figuring things out as I go. And clumsy workers sometimes do the best things. You quickly see the work of the Spirit then: it just happens.”
“Clumsy workers sometimes do the best things.”
Nevertheless, there are conscious choices. Hospitality must be continually named, because it is an essential characteristic of the church, not an incidental strategy. “We share in the hospitality of God, and that’s why we welcome everyone.” The way they interact with children, however, is very deliberate. “I detest churches where children are told to sit quietly on their chairs. Why? That goes against their nature! Just let them sit however they are naturally. Even upside down—I don’t care.” He immediately shares an anecdote about a service where he challenged the children to scream so loudly they would hear it in the sermon. “And sure enough, they promptly did. It completely threw me off my sermon. ‘That’s well done! Good listening!'”
Balance between generations
How does he maintain the balance between young families and the older generation?
“I’m actually never that consciously preoccupied with it,” Pieter confesses. “What we are very conscious about is that we cater to young people in our music choices. That is a sacrifice we ask of the older members.” The compensation is a retro-service on Sunday afternoons, but in the morning, the choice leans towards the youth.
“If you speak in such a way that a fifteen-year-old generally grasps it, then the eighty-five-year-old often finds it just as beautiful,” he explains. “What does a grandmother want most? That her grandchild is in church and understands what’s happening. I’d rather have an eighty-year-old ask her grandchild during coffee, ‘Did the minister use the word TikTok? What exactly is that?’ than have the grandchild have to ask the grandmother what the minister meant.”
The art of preaching without notes
Fascinated, I ask how he manages it: he preaches completely without looking at his paper. “It’s funny how it started,” he recounts. A babysitter in his first parish remarked: “I have to laugh at you on Sunday morning. You turn a page and you don’t even look—you just keep talking.” That’s how he discovered he already knew the sermon practically by heart.
The prerequisite, however, is that the sermon’s structure must be crystal clear. “If I’m trying to memorise my sermon and I can’t do it, I have to rewrite it. Because if the structure isn’t good, it’s not good for the people in the church either.” Every sermon is about a thousand words and fully written out, but only the structure and the Bible references are explicitly committed to memory. The stories, he emphasises, are what stick the longest, after all.
Dealing with criticism
“How do you deal with criticism?” I ask, because no minister escapes it. “I just beat them up,” Pieter grins. And, on a serious note: “It depends heavily on the kind of criticism, of course. Often, it’s a matter of talking things through properly: what do you mean by it, and where is it coming from?”
“I just beat them up.”
He offers an eye-opening example: criticism that he preaches too little about ethics. “When I talk that through, it often turns out that we differ on what ethics is. For some, it’s about abortion and euthanasia. For me, ethics is also about wealth, justice, what you buy in the supermarket, climate. A third of Jesus’s warnings have to do with money. You see the astonishment in such a conversation.”
Consolation and the light in the cracks
The conversation returns to telling his young children about the death of their mother.
“You just have to say she’s dead,” Pieter states firmly. “Use the word ‘dead’, not ‘passed away’. Children grasp that very quickly, because they often see a dead mouse or bird. ‘Mommy is sleeping’ is confusing, because then she can wake up again.”
And the best consolation for himself? “I had a childhood friend who took me out to do something fun. Just turning my attention to something else, focusing on my future—that was incredibly comforting.” His group of friends was also essential. “In the first year, they would say: ‘We’re coming to you, bringing dinner, and we’ll even put the dishes in the dishwasher.’ That offered more comfort than all the platitudes.”
“Avoiding people in grief is related to being confronted with your own mortality and vulnerability,” Pieter explains. “And we don’t want that. But truly being human also means daring to face your mortality.” Henri Nouwen spoke of the Wounded Healer, Leonard Cohen sings about the cracks where the light gets in: “There’s a crack in everything, but that’s where the light gets in.” Pieter Both resonates with this. “The light in the wound. There is no light without that path through which the light penetrates. Perhaps we need those cracks of life to truly see how the light of God shines in our lives.”
He increasingly sees the inverse theology of the gospel. “The remarkable thing about the God of Jesus Christ is that He is God precisely in smallness. The rich become poor, the poor become rich. Only when you are weak are you powerful. God in death. God in the small. Where do you see God? In the cracks of life.”
Simply beautiful work
If he could speak to his thirty-years-younger self? “Don’t let things stress you out. Just be yourself. Serve Jesus and don’t pretend you’re the Messiah. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Remember that it is God’s work, and you just get to shuffle along behind it a little. It doesn’t all depend on your effort.”
He truly lives “in the moment,” without grand dreams or career planning. “You find the most satisfaction in what you do today and what is successful.” His young colleague expressed it aptly: “I really learned from Pieter that being a minister is simply wonderfully beautiful work. You have so much freedom, such varied work. And then there’s the spiritual dimension on top of that, because it’s about God and people. What more could you want?”
As I listen back to the conversation, one sentence from his book remains: “Death is naturally the most extreme form of being without God.” But anyone who meets Pieter Both experiences the very opposite: someone who seeks and finds God in ordinary life, in vulnerability, in the cracks where the light falls in. A “clumsy worker in the church,” who precisely because of that makes room for the Spirit. Without great ambitions, he has created a community where you are welcome, where children are allowed to scream, and where hospitality is an essential characteristic, not a strategy.
Perhaps not everyone wants to become a minister because not everyone can fumble as effectively as Pieter Both.
@Wim van Putten